& Other Stories Unisex Home Accessories: Where Scandinavian Minimalism Meets Everyday Luxury
There is something quietly revolutionary about a brand that refuses to design for gender. In a market still largely organized around pink and blue, his and hers, masculine and feminine, & Other Stories has carved out a space that feels genuinely different — a world where a ceramic candle holder, a linen cushion cover, or a hand cream with the most elegant packaging you have ever seen belongs to whoever reaches for it first. The brand’s home accessory line is an extension of exactly this philosophy, and if you have not yet explored it, you are missing one of the most thoughtful collections available on the high street today.
This post is a deep dive into the world of & Other Stories unisex home accessories — what makes them special, how to style them, why they resonate so strongly with modern interiors, and how you can build a home environment that feels curated, calm, and completely your own.
What Does “Unisex” Actually Mean in Home Design?
Before getting into the specifics of & Other Stories’ collection, it is worth pausing on the word “unisex” itself, because in home design it carries a particular meaning. When we talk about unisex home accessories, we are really talking about pieces that transcend the traditional aesthetic binaries that have long governed interior design. We are talking about objects that do not lean heavily on floral motifs coded as feminine or on industrial brutalism coded as masculine. Instead, they occupy a middle ground that is warm, tactile, and universally inviting.
& Other Stories achieves this through a dedication to materials, texture, and restrained color palettes. Their home accessories tend to live in a world of warm neutrals — oat, sand, sage, terracotta, off-white, and deep earthy browns — rather than anything that reads as strongly gendered. The shapes are organic but not fussy, simple but not stark. The result is a collection that feels as at home in a minimalist apartment shared by two people who disagree on everything aesthetically as it does in a studio occupied by a single person who knows exactly who they are and what they want.
This is the quiet power of well-designed neutral objects: they adapt. They do not impose. They invite you to make them your own.
The Aesthetic Philosophy Behind & Other Stories
& Other Stories was launched in 2013 as a sister brand to H&M, but it has always operated with a distinct creative identity. Rather than a single design direction, the brand runs multiple ateliers — originally based in Stockholm, Paris, and Los Angeles — each with its own creative sensibility. This multi-atelier approach gives the brand an unusual breadth, allowing it to be simultaneously minimalist and maximalist, edgy and romantic, functional and purely decorative.
When this philosophy is applied to home accessories, the results are pieces that feel like they were designed by someone who actually lives with beautiful things rather than someone designing for a catalogue shot. There is an awareness of how objects feel in the hand, how they look in natural light at different times of day, how they interact with other pieces on a shelf or a bedside table. This tactile intelligence is something you notice immediately when you encounter & Other Stories home products in person, and it is a big part of why so many interior design enthusiasts have made the brand a permanent fixture in their shopping rotation.
Key Categories in the & Other Stories Home Accessory Collection
Candles and Home Fragrance
Perhaps no category better illustrates & Other Stories’ unisex appeal than their candle and home fragrance range. Scent has historically been one of the most gendered categories in retail, with feminine fragrances leaning floral and sweet and masculine fragrances leaning woody and sharp. & Other Stories refuses this binary.
Their candles tend toward complex, layered scents — smoked amber, cedarwood and vetiver, fig and white musk, bergamot and sea salt — that resist easy categorization. These are not the candles that announce a gender when you walk into a room. They create atmosphere, full stop. The vessels themselves are just as considered: thick glass, matte ceramic, or clean concrete-effect containers that look beautiful long after the wax has burned down and you have found a new use for the jar.
For anyone building a unisex living space or simply looking for a gift that does not make assumptions about the recipient, these candles are close to perfect.
Ceramics and Tableware
The ceramic pieces in the & Other Stories home collection reflect a love of artisanal craft without veering into the overly rustic or the overly precious. You will find small bowls that work equally well as a jewellery holder, a condiment dish, or a plant pot. You will find mugs with the kind of satisfying weight that makes a morning coffee feel like an occasion. You will find vases in forms that are clearly inspired by studio pottery traditions but at price points that do not require an agonizing decision before purchase.
What unifies these pieces is a quality of attention. Even within a mass-market context, & Other Stories ceramics manage to look and feel like someone cared about getting the proportions right, the glaze even, the finish honest. They sit beautifully alongside independently made studio pottery, which is exactly what you want from high-street homeware — the ability to blend seamlessly with more expensive or one-of-a-kind pieces rather than looking conspicuously budget.
Textiles and Cushion Covers
In the textile department, & Other Stories tends toward natural fibers — linen, cotton, wool blends — in weaves and textures that reward close attention. A cushion cover that looks like a simple oat-colored rectangle from across the room reveals, up close, a subtle slub texture in the fabric or a contrast trim that elevates the whole thing considerably.
These textiles work beautifully in the kind of layered, tone-on-tone approach to interior styling that has become genuinely dominant in contemporary interiors. Stack two or three cushions in different textures but the same warm neutral family, add a throw in a complementary weave, and you have a sofa situation that looks effortlessly considered without requiring a degree in interior design.
The unisex nature of these textiles comes through in both color and pattern choices. & Other Stories tends to favor stripes, abstract marks, geometric weave structures, and textural interest over florals or figurative prints. This gives the pieces a broad versatility that makes them easy to integrate into almost any existing interior.
Personal Care and Bathroom Accessories
One of the most interesting aspects of the & Other Stories home accessory range is how fluidly it moves between home and personal care. Their bathroom accessories — soap dishes, cotton rounds holders, small trays for organizing a bathroom shelf — are designed with the same aesthetic consistency as the rest of the collection, so they genuinely work together.
More interestingly, their personal care products — hand creams, body oils, soaps — are packaged with such restraint and elegance that they function as both products and objects. A beautifully packaged hand cream sitting on the edge of a sink is part of the bathroom’s aesthetic, not separate from it. This is a consideration that many beauty brands miss entirely, and it is one that & Other Stories has built into the DNA of the range.
The scent profiles of these personal care products mirror the home fragrance philosophy: complex, neutral, universally appealing. They are as likely to be found on a man’s bathroom shelf as a woman’s, which is exactly the point.
Stationery and Desk Accessories
For anyone who spends time working from home — which, in the post-2020 world, is a significant proportion of people — the desk has become a new frontier in interior styling. & Other Stories has responded to this with a range of stationery and desk accessories that bring the same restrained elegance to the work environment that the broader collection brings to living spaces.
Notebooks with tactile covers, pen holders in muted tones, small desktop organizers in materials that feel premium without being corporate — these are pieces that make a desk feel like a creative space rather than a functional obligation. Combined with the brand’s broader home accessories, they help create a coherent visual environment that flows from living space to workspace without jarring transitions.
How to Style & Other Stories Home Accessories
Styling is where the real joy of a well-designed unisex home accessory collection reveals itself. Because these pieces are not pushing you in any particular aesthetic direction, you have genuine creative freedom. Here are some approaches that work particularly well with the & Other Stories range.
The Tonal Shelf. Take a shelf or a section of shelving and commit to a single tonal family — say, warm whites and naturals. Arrange a combination of & Other Stories ceramics, a candle or two, a small plant in a neutral pot, and perhaps a book or two with minimal cover design. The result is the kind of effortlessly curated shelf that looks as though it came together naturally, which it almost did, because you were starting from a place of tonal coherence.
The Scent Station. Dedicate a small tray or a corner of a surface to scent. A candle, a reed diffuser if you use one, perhaps a small ceramic or two, and a beautifully packaged personal care product. This creates a small zone within a larger space that engages the senses in a specific way, which makes even a functional room feel more intentional and inviting.
The Layered Bed. Use & Other Stories textiles as the foundation of a layered bed styling — a linen cushion cover in one texture, a slightly different weave in a complementary tone, a throw folded at the foot of the bed. The key is staying within a narrow color palette while varying texture, which gives depth without visual noise.
The Functional Ornament. One of the most satisfying things about the & Other Stories aesthetic is that many pieces work both decoratively and functionally. A ceramic bowl that is also jewelry storage. A tray that corrals everyday objects while looking beautiful. A candle vessel that becomes a pen holder. Lean into this dual functionality by asking, whenever you add a new piece to a space, whether it can do two things at once.
Why Unisex Home Design Matters Right Now
The movement toward unisex home design is not just an aesthetic trend — it reflects something real about how people are living. More people are sharing spaces with partners who have different aesthetic preferences. More people are rejecting the idea that their home should signal their gender rather than their personality. More people are looking for interiors that feel calm and livable rather than performatively styled for a particular lifestyle identity.
& Other Stories taps directly into all of these shifts. By designing home accessories that do not make assumptions about who will buy them or how they will live, the brand creates space for genuine personal expression. You are not being handed a predefined aesthetic package and asked to inhabit it. You are being offered beautiful objects and trusted to know what to do with them.
This is a more respectful approach to design than it might first appear. It treats the buyer as an intelligent adult who knows their own tastes. It removes the exhausting gender signaling that clutters so much of the homeware market. And it produces objects that can genuinely last — not just physically, because they are well made, but aesthetically, because they are not so trend-specific that they date quickly.
Value, Quality, and Sustainability Considerations
A fair conversation about any brand’s home accessories has to include value and sustainability, and & Other Stories occupies an interesting middle ground. The prices sit above the most basic high-street offerings but well below the luxury end of the market, which positions them as an accessible upgrade for many buyers.
Quality, in our experience across the range, is generally good. The ceramics are solid, the textiles have a quality of hand that exceeds their price point, and the packaging on personal care products is genuinely considered rather than decorative excess. These are not heirloom pieces, but they are pieces that will last beyond a single season if cared for, which matters in an era when thoughtful consumption is increasingly the goal.
On the sustainability front, & Other Stories, like its parent company H&M Group, has made public commitments around materials and supply chain transparency, though the fast fashion industry as a whole continues to face legitimate scrutiny in this area. If sustainability is a primary concern for you, it is worth researching the brand’s current commitments and reading critically, as with any brand making environmental claims.
Where to Find & Other Stories Home Accessories
The home accessory collection is available through the & Other Stories website, which ships internationally, and through their physical stores in major cities across Europe, North America, and beyond. The online experience is well organized, and the product photography does a better-than-average job of conveying texture and scale, which matters enormously when buying homeware you cannot touch before purchase.
New pieces tend to be released in alignment with seasonal collections, so checking the home section regularly is worthwhile if you want to catch new arrivals. Pieces do sell out, particularly the more distinctive ceramic forms and limited-edition candle vessels, so if something catches your eye, the usual advice applies: do not wait too long.
Final Thoughts
The best home accessories are the ones that disappear into your life — not because they are invisible, but because they become so naturally part of your environment that you stop seeing them as objects and start experiencing them as atmosphere. & Other Stories’ unisex home accessory collection is remarkably good at achieving this. It offers beauty without fussiness, coherence without rigidity, and quality without inaccessibility.
Whether you are furnishing a first apartment, refreshing a room you have lived in for years, or looking for a gift that will genuinely be appreciated, this collection deserves a serious look. It is designed for everyone, which in practice means it is designed for you — whoever you are, however you live, whatever home means to you right now.
That is not a small thing. In a market full of products that ask you to fit yourself to them, it is actually quite rare.
